The Patriot Post® · Regulatory Commissars: Clean Water Act Holes

Ronald Reagan once noted, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.’” Under the Obama administration, the EPA is relentlessly proving Reagan’s observation by attempting to regulate small water bodies as “wetlands” under the Clean Water Act. Naturally, leftist green pressure groups who mindlessly believe an ever more intrusive big government bureaucracy is the most effective environmental steward are cheering the agency’s mission creep.

EPA’s gambit to regulate these water bodies is based on its novel new interpretation of the Clean Water Act’s applicability to its undefined phrase, “waters of the United States.” Judges and EPA regulators have struggled to interpret this phrase in the absence of legislative clarity. Now the agency is proposing a regulatory solution and conducting a politically tainted review to accumulate evidence to back up its interpretation of its shiny new rule. Lost in the politicizing fog is the common-sense notion that bodies of water can’t all be wetlands – they’re either water or land.

As with so many of the Obama agencies, EPA has run wild and must be reined in. Perhaps the 2014 election will bring conservatives to office who will do just that.